


Juno Steel and the End of the Line

by Gileonnen



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Choosing a Happy Ending, Depression, Dubiously Legal Medical Practices, Miraculous Rescues, Noir Narration, Other, Rita's Mad Hacking Skills, Suicidal Ideation, Temporary Character Death, radiation poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 21:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13086048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: They say that just before the end, your life flashes before your eyes. Every mistake, every stupid decision, every life you've ever ruined and every chance you never took, flickering across the projection screen of your eyelids like an antique movie playing to an audience of one.Like most things people say about dying, it's hard to prove. The living don't know, and the dead aren't talking.My name is Juno Steel, and this is the story of how I died.





	Juno Steel and the End of the Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KiaraSayre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/gifts).



> Thank you for the wonderful beta, Sath!

They say that just before the end, your life flashes before your eyes. Every mistake, every stupid decision, every life you've ever ruined and every chance you never took, flickering across the projection screen of your eyelids like an antique movie playing to an audience of one.

Like most things people say about dying, it's hard to prove. The living don't know, and the dead aren't talking.

My name is Juno Steel, and this is the story of how I died.

* * *

The Free Dome. Dawn. I was trapped in the ruins of somebody else's dream, listening to my own dissolving into a cloud of radio static. The election was over. Pilot Pereyra had lost, not that I could rub it in their face. The Piranha and her cronies had won, not that she'd ever get to enjoy it. The two of them were dead on the ground behind me, their eyes dusted over with red, red sand.

There was nothing left for me here, so I started walking.

Into the rusted wasteland of the Martian desert. From horizon to horizon, just jagged red rocks and swirling dust, and the haze of radiation wherever the sun hit the stone. The air was colder than I'd thought it would be, but I felt like I was burning up.

I wasn't going to get far before the radiation fried me or a sandstorm flayed my bones. Maybe I wasn't trying to get away. Maybe I just wanted to wait for the end alone.

There's a point when the human body knows it's done. For me, that point came when the Free Dome was still a cracked shell on the horizon. I curled up in the shade of a red stone cliff and closed my eyes.

" _The Theia Spectrum is now online_." One eye cracked open, scanning the desert like it was going to find anything besides the world's largest red rock collection.

"Go away."

" _Detecting approaching hovercraft_."

"Bullshit. There's a sandstorm coming. Nobody's that crazy."

" _Engage hailing protocols?_ "

"Just leave me here to die."

" _Overriding: ennui._ "

The Theia jerked me up like a marionette. I felt my feet hit the sand, and then I was moving. Every step burned. Even with the Theia taking the wheel, there wasn't much left of me to drive. I came out of the shade and into an unrelenting wall of sunlight.

Agony tore through me like a welder's arc. My vision started to blur. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw smoke billowing from the other. " _Theia Spectrum is shutting down._ "

The world dissolved into pixels, a trillion points of red light spiraling through the void. And then I blacked out.

* * *

"--so then I says to Marsha, 'If he just taught her how to use a laser sword, she wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place!' And then Marsha says--ooh, that's a beep! Listen, that was a definite beep! Ooh, there was another one! Mister Steel!"

I opened my eye. Just one eye. I reached out to the Theia, listening for that sexy inhuman voice creeping through my neurons.

Nothing.

Rita pounded the glass again. "I'm so glad you're awake, Mister Steel! When I first saw you all the way out in the desert, I thought, 'Oooooh, that must be some kinda glitch,' but then I recalibrated all my tracking algorithms and, by the way, they are running so smoothly now, definitely fixed that last conditional statement for good this time. Anyway! I says to myself, 'He's _definitely_ in some kind of trouble, so you'd better get some contingencies ready,' so I've got all your favorite soap operas recorded and that Ionian ginger fish snack you like and you would not _believe_ the trouble I had finding someone who could steal an oxygen chamber on short notice--"

So that was where I was. Trapped in a glass cylinder pumped full of oxygen, with whatever Rita thought my favorite soap operas were on standby. At least Rita had brought me back to the office.

"--and I thought you were gonna _die._ "

I looked up at Rita through the glass. It had fogged up around her hand, but I could still see her fingers shaking.

"Rita," I said. I lined my hand up with hers. "Whatever happened out there, I'm here now. This is important. Pilot Pereyra is dead. So's Piranha-face. They're back near where you found me. Listen, Ramses O'Flaherty is dirty. I have recordings--the Theia has recordings--"

"Your eye is a bit fried, I'm afraid."

Last time I heard that voice, it was in a dream. After the day I'd had, it was pretty hard to believe I wasn't still dreaming.

He leaned over Rita's shoulder. He looked ... it doesn't matter how he looked. Dark, wavy hair perfectly framing his face. Glasses shining in the sterile white light. Soft lips curled into a smile that used to make my heart skip a whole measure.

"Peter Nureyev."

"I _told_ you I had a hard time finding someone to steal an oxygen chamber! And he's the best there is!" It shouldn't have surprised me to hear that Rita had known where he was the whole time. She had a tracking algorithm that could find an angel on the head of a pin, and I hadn't exactly been looking.

"She flatters me. But I am the best there is--and so was the Theia Spectrum, before it was exposed to lethal doses of radiation. It's now a very expensive marble, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, Juno."

I turned over onto the side where the Theia had been. It still didn't feel real, not hearing that voice whispering under every thought. I wasn't sure whether to grieve. "Just leave me alone, Nureyev. It's all my fault. Ramses, Pilot--everything. Just leave me here to die."

"You did die, for two and a half minutes." I heard him sit down behind me and lay his hand on the glass. "Don't make me watch that again."

* * *

_"I can't do it, Charlie. I can't live a lie anymore. My heart knows what it wants."_

_"But Sidney, what will your mothers say?"_

_"I don't care. They can have a child who's the supreme leader of an intergalactic criminal empire--or they can have me."_

Rita apparently thought I was still following _Shadows of Deceit_ after that heartbreaking triple-cross at the end of season fifty-three. I hated to admit it, but she was right.

While Rita was watching Sidney spring Charlie from the Fortezza in a dazzling aerial chase sequence, Nureyev sidled up to the oxygen tube. "Ready to get out of here?"

Whatever they'd pumped into me while I was under, it seemed to have helped. I still felt like I'd gone ten rounds against a bulldozer made of battery acid, but at least I didn't feel like throwing up anymore. "Sure. Let me out."

He undid the catch on the side of the tube. It hissed open. Peter offered his hand, and I couldn't think of anything I wanted less right now than to take it. I swung my legs over the side of the tube. Even that much effort made the world go grey around the edges.

He caught me around the shoulders and kept me up. I almost wished he'd laugh it off with some crack about knocking all the ladies off their feet, but he just ... held me. Like he was afraid I'd dissolve into dust.

"I need clothes. Inconspicuous, if you've got 'em; loud, if you don't."

"Still holding a grudge over that little train caper? I'm sure I could scare up a nice cocktail dress, if you want one."

"Right now, I'd settle for a barrel and some suspenders."

"One barrel, coming up."

He left me there on the steel bed of the oxygen tube, listening to the end credits music as Rita sniffled on her chair. I looked around the office: sagging couch. Paperweights. Filing cabinets for evidence we never got around to filing. Snack wrappers. Screens flickering just a little when the wiring twitched. Home.

After a few days in the centuries-old shafts under the Martian desert, it didn't look familiar anymore. Even the air smelled wrong--clean. Filtered. Suspiciously of curry.

I waited for the Theia's tactical assessment, but nothing came. For the first time in a long time, it was quiet inside my head.

I went over to my desk, and it felt like I'd walked a mile. I punched in the only number I had for Alessandra Strong and let it ring.

" _Hello, you've reached Alessandra Strong, Private Investigator. I can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message._ "

She was probably still underground. It was stupid to worry about her. She was a trained survivor with a pack full of rations and a healthy appreciation for traps--she'd make it back.

She had to make it back. I couldn't have another death on my conscience.

"Rita?"

"Ssh, the new episode's starting!"

"Rita, can you--"

"I need to know what happens, boss!"

"I'll tell you what happens. Charlie rats Sidney out to their mothers, and they carve a trail of blood through the Jovian Mob in retaliation. Now, turn that off. This is important."

"Why would you _say_ that to me? You ruined the show." The screen went black. "Okay, Mister Steel. What's so important?"

I tried to breathe. "Rita, you said you fixed that tracking algorithm? Can you find anyone with it?"

"Sure, anyone on Mars! I just have to cross-reference biometrics against security footage, run a quick little search on the sensor grids, piggyback off a couple of extra satellite networks--and boom! Anyone could do it."

"That's ... terrifying. What about underground, Rita?"

"What, like in the subway system? Sure."

"Maybe a little further out than that. Don't know how long I was under." I had to make myself breathe. It felt like someone was squeezing my ribs in a vise. "Can you find Alessandra Strong? She was with me out there. We--we got separated. I need to know if she's all right."

Rita wheeled over to her terminal and started typing. "Okay, Strong, Alessandra--oops, that's a double S--" Lines of code flashed down the screen, complex equations and addresses I couldn't understand. "Okay, just gotta close the query--and done!"

Grainy footage from an analog camera came up on the screen. Just a shoulder and part of a cheek; she knew to avoid the camera's line of sight. Smart woman. "Where is this?"

"Looks like a service tunnel near the spaceport. Is she making a break for it?"

 _Very_ smart woman. "She sure is. Hope she stopped to pick up her fiancée on the way out. Let her go, Rita."

That split second of footage played again. Alessandra's cheek. There was a cut on it that hadn't been there when I'd lost her at the Free Dome, and it was nearly healed over. "How long was I out?"

"A couple of weeks, boss. It was bad--it was really, really bad. The eye kept rolling around and sparking, and we had to bring in somebody to pull it out of you, but it had all these wires, and they said they weren't _sure_ they got 'em all, _and_ we had to regrow half your skin, and radiation _ruins_ your bone marrow, and apparently your body needs that for all kinds of stuff--"

"But fortunately, we live on Mars, where radiation poisoning is as common as a cold." Peter Nureyev stepped back into the room with a nice suit over one arm. Velvet-collared jacket. Sharp red button-down. Pinstripe skirt. "It wasn't really _necessary_ to steal you an oxygen chamber, but Rita insisted. The pills would have done the job on their own."

I took the hanger from his hands and started dressing. Everything fit like it had been tailored for me, but he'd had a couple of weeks to figure out my size.

It really hit me then. I looked in the waste basket, full of takeout boxes and empty pill bottles. Over to the couch, which had sagged in the shape of Rita's body. My chair, pulled up beside the oxygen tube with a blanket thrown over the seat. Even after everything I'd done, killed people in front of them and broken their hearts and turned their lives upside down, they'd sat here eating takeout curry and waiting for me to wake up.

They'd watched me die in that tube, and they hadn't left my side until they'd dragged me back.

"I need to go for a walk. Clear my head."

Nureyev offered his arm. "If you'd like someone to escort you ..."

"Thanks, but I'd rather be alone."

* * *

They say that just before the end, you see a bright light approaching through a long darkness. As though life is a tunnel and death is an oncoming hovertrain, ten thousand tons of freight and fire and shouting wrapped in a thin shell of steel.

Even before the Free Dome, I sometimes found myself walking down to the tracks at night and thinking too hard about mortality and metaphors. The trains roar through Hyperion City Station without stopping, on their way from nowhere to nowhere. Little islands of light moving through the long, cold Martian night.

On a good night, I think about catching the ladder on a fast train and seeing how far I get before the dawn. The midnight passenger train could get me all the way to Olympus Mons before the radiation got strong enough to cook me. I've seen pictures of the city coiled up at the mountain's feet, her crystal spires and her crooked steel bones. They say it snows there, on the lower slopes, beneath where the mountain's crown scrapes the atmosphere. A perfect white blanket to cover up all the grease and the grime and the graft and the blood. Any city that gleams like that has got to be filthy beneath the surface.

On a bad night like tonight ...

"Juno."

I took in a breath. "Goddamnit, Nureyev, I told you to leave me alone."

At this hour, the train yard was deserted. Peter Nureyev was standing there in a long white jacket with his face bare beneath the floodlights. He shone like a beacon, and I wanted to fling myself into the cool white light of him.

He sat on the edge of the platform. His long legs dangled over the side. "Isn't it exhausting, running away from everyone you care about?"

"A little, but I keep hydrated."

He looked up at me like he expected me to sit, so I sat. He kept his hands down at his sides, and so did I.

"I notice you're still keeping your good eye toward me. Are you really so afraid of what I'll see?"

Yes, I'm afraid. I'm afraid he'll see the gaping hole in my skull where Ramses O'Flaherty put his ideas. I'm afraid that somehow he'll see filaments still winding through my nerves like weeds, feeding someone else's impulses to my muscles until I'm just another piece of remotely operated hardware. I'm afraid that no matter how clean the extraction was, no matter how carefully they unhooked the eye from my synapses, there will always be some part of it they missed.

I'm afraid he'll see how useless I am without the eye pulling my puppet strings.

To Peter, I just said, "I like to keep people where I can see them."

"I'm not the one who pulled a disappearing act."

"Not this time."

He smiled at me. Not like he was sorry for me--just like he was sorry. God, I've missed his smile. "No, Juno. Not this time."

He touched my hand as though it could really be that easy. No groveling, no apologies, no blame. Not even asking where I went that night I left him, when the world was ours and Hyperion City spread out beneath us like a spill of broken glass. Just slipping back into his place at my side, as easy as palm meeting palm. His fingers were warmer than mine.

I'd missed his hands.

"I ... think about dying a lot. Even before I lost the eye, sometimes it was all I thought about. How many people would still be alive if I'd done something differently, or if I'd just ... known more, _been more._ But this is it. This is me. Sometimes I wish something would happen to me that was completely out of my control so that I could just stop fighting."

"So it wouldn't be your fault."

"Yeah."

Peter pulled me into his arms, and I let him. We sat there together as the wind blew red gravel across the smooth repulsor tracks, not saying anything. Around us, Hyperion City ground on: a hungry machine, her sirens wailing in the distance. Part of me wanted to be devoured. Part of me just wanted to sleep.

After a while, I held him back. He smelled like jasmine and iron, and that hot ozone scent of atmosphere. When I leaned into him, it was like he was a scaffolding holding me up.

"Come away with me."

I wanted to say yes. "You know I can't. I've got work to do here. No one else has the dirt to bury Ramses O'Flaherty--and someone has to keep Rita in cute hats."

He let me go. _This is it,_ I thought. _After years of just leaving each other behind, it's finally time to say goodbye._

Peter looked me in the eyes. Both of them, the one I had left and the one I'd lost. "I'm not much good with shovels. But I'm sure I could find a little extra dirt, if I went looking ... and I know a thing or two about cute hats."

"You realize what this means, right? If I go down under this, you go down with me."

It should have scared him to hear that. It scares the hell out of me. But Peter Nureyev's gaze never wavered. He took my hand like it was a lifeline. For once in my goddamn life, I wanted to be his anchor. "I understand, Juno. No more running away."

In the distance, a train peered over the curve of the horizon. I saw the light of it approaching through the darkness--but then Peter's hand was on my cheek, pulling me back to look at him, and suddenly all I could see were his glittering dark eyes.

They say that just before the end, you see your whole life play out in a flash of light. You see every choice you made, every moment when you decided whether to face yourself or keep running. And looking into Peter's eyes, I knew that this was one of those moments.

I kissed him. "Only if someone's chasing us--and then, we'll run together."


End file.
